Small Businesses Are Still Slow To Adopt Social Media,This Is Why

Most small businesses are still learning how to do social media right. If your business is still at this stage of adoption, you are missing out and your competition is getting the most of social media and and you are not. There are now over 2.8 billion social media profiles, representing around half of all internet users worldwide. You don’t want to miss that, do you? Twitter has over over 465 million Twitter accounts and Facebook has over 845 million active users. You don’t want to miss the opportunity these accounts and users offers small businesses.

Many businesses are still unfamiliar with social media. Not knowing what to do or how to do it keeps many opportunities untouched. The earlier you join the social media train, the better for your business because the growth and adoption are increasing and your competition is doing it. They may not be doing it right, but at least they have started. If you fall within this category, you can hire a consultant to help you craft a good strategy to begin. Once that is completed, delegate your social media campaign and its implementation to one of your employees and request for metrics or report on its management from time to time.

Other small businesses are still struggling with a good social media policy they can work with. They are still not confident about how best employees can represent them online. There is till that fear of the wrong message, information or update that will tarnish a customer’s experience; the fear of the ‘indignant employee’ that airs company information in an inappropriate manner. And, they’re unsure how to create a social media plan that they could teach their employees as well. Some way somehow you will create that policy soon. You can start by following a simple rule where only a particular piece of information is shared with your audience. You can even share only resources that can educate your followers about your industry.

Again, some businesses are still figuring out how to measure the value of social media. Apparently the return on investment(ROI) of social media is still not tangle enough for some businesses. Companies therefore find it difficult to invest money of funds into it. The thought of hiring a consultant or employee to manage social media accounts is unheard-of. If you think that is not necessary, consider it as a reputation management. You have no idea what customers are saying about your business online. The only way to manage that and even interact with such customers is through social media management.

Furthermore, keeping up with rapidly advancing technologies and equipping the workforce with the right set of skills to embrace social media requires investment in lifelong learning. The shortage of qualified staff is felt in the social media sector itself, where lack of information technology professionals is slowing growth, but also in other sectors where experienced staffs are often slow to adapt to changing technologies. ‘Digital illiteracy’ is the big problem here.

In short businesses are slow to adopt social media because They don’t know what to do, don’t know how they are going to benefit or what the benefits are to them, its seen as an additional cost, its not seen as an benefit, Social media is not for business, don’t have or won’t make time to investigate it, don’t know how to make money using it.

Founding Editor @Alltopstartups, Columnist @Inc. Magazine and Curator at Postanly (his free weekly digest of the best life and career improvement posts on the web). Subscribe for free. Check out his books on Amazon.